Chapter 20

“Then it was not a suicide,” I exclaimed. “It was a murder!”

Craig shook his head sententiously. Evidently he not prepared yet to talk.

With another look at the body in the broken casket he remarked: “To-morrow I want to call on Mrs. Phelps and Doctor Forden, and, if it is possible to find him, Dana Phelps. Meanwhile, Andrews, if you and Walter will stand guard here, there is an apparatus which I should like to get from my laboratory and set up here before it is too late.”

It was far past the witching hour of midnight, when graveyards proverbially yawn, before Craig returned in the car. Nothing had happened in the meantime except those usual eery noises that one may hear in the country at night anywhere. Our visitor of the early evening seemed to have been scared away for good.

Inside the mausoleum, Kennedy set up a peculiar machine which he attached to the electric-light circuit in the street by a long wire which he ran loosely over the ground. Part of the apparatus consisted of an elongated box lined with lead, to which were several other attachments, the nature of which I did not understand, and a crank-handle.

“What’s that?” asked Andrews curiously, as Craig set up a screen between the apparatus and the body.

“This is a calcium-tungsten screen,” remarked Kennedy, adjusting now what I know to be a Crookes’ tube on the other side of the body itself, so that the order was: the tube, the body, the screen, and the oblong box. Without a further word we continued to watch him.

At last, the apparatus adjusted apparently to his satisfaction, he brought out a jar of thick white liquid and a bottle of powder.

“Buttermilk and a couple of ounces of bismuth sub-carbonate,” he remarked, as he mixed some in a glass, and with a pump forced it down the throat of the body, now lying so that the abdomen was almost flat against the screen.

He turned a switch and the peculiar bluish effulgence, which always appears when a Crookes’ tube is being used, burst forth, accompanied by the droning of his induction-coil and the welcome smell of ozone produced by the electrical discharge in the almost fetid air of the tomb. Meanwhile, he was gradually turning the handle of the crank attached to the oblong box. He seemed so engrossed in the delicateness of the operation that we did not question him, in fact did not move. For Andrews, at least, it was enough to know that he had succeeded in enlisting Kennedy’s services.

Well along toward morning it was before Kennedy had concluded his tests, whatever they were, and had packed away his paraphernalia.

“I’m afraid it will take me two or three days to get at this evidence, even now,” he remarked, impatient at even the limitations science put on his activity. We had started back for a quick run to the city and rest. “But, anyhow, it will give us a chance to do some investigating along other lines.”

Early the next day, in spite of the late session of the night before, Kennedy started me with him on a second visit to Woodbine. This time he was armed with a letter of introduction from Andrews to Mrs. Phelps.

She proved to be a young woman of most extraordinary grace and beauty, with a superb carriage such as only years of closest training under the best dancers of the world could give. There was a peculiar velvety softness about her flesh and skin, a witching stoop to her shoulders that was decidedly continental, and in her deep, soulful eyes a half-wistful look that was most alluring. In fact, she was as attractive a widow as the best Fifth Avenue dealers in mourning goods could have produced.

I knew that ‘Ginette Phelps had been, both as dancer and wife, always the centre of a group of actors, artists, and men of letters as well as of the world and affairs. The Phelpses had lived well, although they were not extremely wealthy, as fortunes go. When the blow fell, I could well fancy that the loss of his money had been most serious to young Montague, who had showered everything as lavishly as he was able upon his captivating bride.

Mrs. Phelps did not seem to be overjoyed at receiving us, yet made no open effort to refuse.

“How long ago did the coma first show itself?” asked Kennedy, after our introductions were completed. “Was your husband a man of neurotic tendency, as far as you could judge?”

“Oh, I couldn’t say when it began,” she answered, in a voice that was soft and musical and under perfect control. “The doctor would know that better. No, he was not neurotic, I think.”

“Did you ever see Mr. Phelps take any drugs—not habitually, but just before this sleep came on?”

Kennedy was seeking his information in a manner and tone that would cause as little offence as possible “Oh, no,” she hastened. “No, never—absolutely.”

“You called in Dr. Forden the last night?”

“Yes, he had been Montague’s physician many years ago, you know.”

“I see,” remarked Kennedy, who was thrusting about aimlessly to get her off her guard. “By the way, you know there is a great deal of gossip about the almost perfect state of preservation of the body, Mrs. Phelps. I see it was not embalmed.”

She bit her lip and looked at Kennedy sharply.

“Why, why do you and Mr. Andrews worry me? Can’t you see Doctor Forden?”

In her annoyance I fancied that there was a surprising lack of sorrow. She seemed preoccupied. I could not escape the feeling that she was putting some obstacle in our way, or that from the day of the discovery of the vandalism, some one had been making an effort to keep the real facts concealed. Was she shielding some one? It flashed over me that perhaps, after all, she had submitted to the blackmail and had buried the money at the appointed place. There seemed to be little use in pursuing the inquiry, so we excused ourselves, much, I thought, to her relief.

We found Doctor Forden, who lived on the same street as the Phelpses several squares away, most fortunately at home. Forden was an extremely interesting man, as is, indeed, the rule with physicians. I could not but fancy, however, that his hearty assurance that he would be glad to talk freely on the case was somewhat forced.

“You were sent for by Mrs. Phelps, that last night, I believe, while Phelps was still alive?” asked Kennedy.

“Yes. During the day it had been impossible to arouse him, and that night, when Mrs. Phelps and the nurse found him sinking even deeper into the comatose state, I was summoned again. He was beyond hope then. I did everything I could, but he died a few moments after I arrived.”

“Did you try artificial respiration?” asked Kennedy.

“N-no,” replied Forden. “I telephoned here for my respirator, but by the time it arrived at the house it was too late. Nothing had been omitted while he was still struggling with the spark of life. When that went out what was the use?”

“You were his personal physician?”

“Yes.”

“Had you ever noticed that he took any drug?”

Doctor Forden shot a quick glance at Kennedy. “Of course not. He was not a drug fiend.”

“I didn’t mean that he was addicted to any drug. But had he taken anything lately, either of his own volition or with the advice or knowledge of any one else?”

“Of course not.”

“There’s another strange thing I wish to ask your opinion about,” pursued Kennedy, not to be rebuffed. “I have seen his body. It is in an excellent state of preservation, almost lifelike. And yet I understand, or at least it seems, that it was not embalmed.”

“You’ll have to ask the undertaker about that,” answered the doctor brusquely.

It was evident that he was getting more and more constrained in his answers. Kennedy did not seem to mind it, but to me it seemed that he must be hiding something. Was there some secret which medical ethics kept locked in his breast? Kennedy had risen and excused himself.

The interviews had not resulted in much, I felt, yet Kennedy did not seem to care. Back in the city again, he buried himself in his laboratory for the rest of the day, most of the time in his dark room, where he was developing photographic plates or films, I did not know which.

During the afternoon Andrews dropped in for a few moments to report that he had nothing to add to what had already developed. He was not much impressed by the interviews.

“There’s just one thing I want to speak about, though,” he said at length, unburdening his mind. “That tomb and the swamp, too, ought to be watched. Last night showed me that there seems to be a regular nocturnal visitor and that we cannot depend on that town night watchman to scare him off. Yet if we watch up there, he will be warned and will lie low. How can we watch both places at once and yet remain hidden?”

Kennedy nodded approval of the suggestion. “I’ll fix that,” he replied, anxious to return to his photographic labours. “Meet me, both of you, on the road from the station at Woodbine, just as it is getting dusk.” Without another word he disappeared into the dark room.

We met him that night as he had requested. He had come up to Woodbine in the baggage-car of the train with a powerful dog, for all the world like a huge, grey wolf.

“Down, Schaef,” he ordered, as the dog began to show an uncanny interest in me. “Let me introduce my new dog-detective,” he chuckled. “She has a wonderful record as a police-dog.”

We were making our way now through the thickening shadows of the town to the outskirts. “She’s a German sheep-dog, a Schaferhund,” he explained. “For my part, it is the English bloodhound in the open country and the sheep-dog in the city and the suburbs.”

Schaef seemed to have many of the characteristics of the wild, prehistoric animal, among them the full, upright ears of the wild dog which are such a great help to it. She was a fine, alert, upstanding dog, hardy, fierce, and literally untiring, of a tawny light brown like a lioness, about the same size and somewhat of the type of the smooth-coated collie, broad of chest and with a full brush of tail.

Untamed though she seemed, she was perfectly under Kennedy’s control, and rendered him absolute and unreasoning obedience.

At the cemetery we established a strict watch about the Phelps mausoleum and the swamp which lay across the road, not a difficult thing to do as far as concealment went, owing to the foliage. Still, for the same reason, it was hard to cover the whole ground. In the shadow of a thicket we waited. Now and then we could hear Schaef scouting about in the underbrush, crouching and hiding, watching and guarding.

As the hours of waiting in the heavily laden night air wore on, I wondered whether our vigil in this weird place would be rewarded. The soughing of the night wind in the evergreens, mournful at best, was doubly so now. Hour after hour we waited patiently.

At last there was a slight noise from the direction opposite the mausoleum and toward the swamp next to the cemetery.

Kennedy reached out and drew us back into the shadow deeper. “Some one is prowling about, approaching the mausoleum on that side, I think,” he whispered.

Instantly there recurred to me the thought I had had earlier in the day that perhaps, after all, the five thousand dollars of hush money, for whatever purpose it might be extorted, had been buried in the swamp by Mrs. Phelps in her anxiety. Had that been what she was concealing? Perhaps the blackmailer had come to reconnoitre, and, if the money was there, to take it away.

Schaef, who had been near us, was sniffing eagerly. From our hiding-place we could just see her. She had heard the sounds, too, even before we had, and for an instant stood with every muscle tense.

Then, like an arrow, she darted into the underbrush. An instant later, the sharp crack of a revolver rang out. Schaef kept right on, never stopping a second, except, perhaps, for surprise.

“Crack!” almost in her face came a second spit of fire in the darkness, and a bullet crashed through the leaves and buried itself in a tree with a ping. The intruder’s marksmanship was poor, but the dog paid no attention to it.

“One of the few animals that show no fear of gunfire,” muttered Kennedy, in undisguised admiration.

“G-R-R-R,” we heard from the police-dog.

“She has made a leap at the hand that holds the gun,” cried Kennedy, now rising and moving rapidly in the same direction. “She has been taught that a man once badly bitten in the hand is nearly out of the fight.”

We followed, too. As we approached we were just in time to see Schaef running in and out between the legs of a man who had heard us approach and was hastily making tracks for the road. As he tripped, she lunged for his back.

Kennedy blew shrilly on a police whistle. Reluctantly, Schaef let go. One could see that with all her canine instinct she wanted to “get” that man. Her jaws were open, as, with longing eyes, she stood over the prostrate form in the grass. The whistle was a signal, and she had been taught to obey unquestioningly.

“Don’t move until we get to you, or you are a dead man,” shouted Kennedy, pulling an automatic as he ran. “Are you hurt?”

There was no answer, but as we approached, the man moved, ever so little, through curiosity to see his pursuers.

Schaef shot forward. Again the whistle sounded and she dropped back. We bent over to seize him as Kennedy secured the dog.

“She’s a devil,” ground out the prone figure on the grass.

“Dana Phelps!” exclaimed Andrews, as the man turned his face toward us. “What are you doing, mixed up in this?”

Suddenly there was a movement in the rear, toward the mausoleum itself. We turned, but it was too late. Two dark figures slunk through the gloom, bearing something between them. Kennedy slipped the leash off Schaef and she shot out like a unchained bolt of lightning.

There was the whir of a high-powered machine which must have sneaked up with the muffler on during the excitement. They had taken a desperate chance and had succeeded. They were gone!

XXII

THE X-RAY “MOVIES”

Still holding Dana Phelps between us, we hurried toward the tomb and entered. While our attention had been diverted in the direction of the swamp, the body of Montague Phelps had been stolen.

Dana Phelps was still deliberately brushing off his clothes. Had he been in league with them, executing a flank movement to divert our attention? Or had it all been pure chance?

“Well?” demanded Andrews.

“Well?” replied Dana.

Kennedy said nothing, and I felt that, with our capture, the mystery seemed to have deepened rather than cleared.

As Andrews and Phelps faced each other, I noticed that the latter was now and then endeavouring to cover his wrist, where the dog had torn his coat sleeve.

“Are you hurt badly?” inquired Kennedy.

Dana said nothing, but backed away. Kennedy advanced, insisting on looking at the wounds. As he looked he disclosed a semicircle of marks.

“Not a dog bite,” he whispered, turning to me and fumbling in his pocket. “Besides, those marks are a couple of days old. They have scabs on them.”

He had pulled out a pencil and a piece of paper, and, unknown to Phelps, was writing in the darkness. I leaned over. Near the point, in the tube through which the point for writing was, protruded a small accumulator and tiny electric lamp which threw a little disc of light, so small that it could be hidden by the hand, yet quite sufficient to guide Craig in moving the point of his pencil for the proper formation of whatever he was recording on the surface of the paper.

“An electric-light pencil,” he remarked laconically, in an undertone.

“Who were the others?” demanded Andrews of Dana.

There was a pause as though he were debating whether or not to answer at all. “I don’t know,” he said at length. “I wish I did.”

“You don’t know?” queried Andrews, with incredulity.

“No, I say I wish I did know. You and your dog interrupted me just as I was about to find out, too.”

We looked at each other in amazement. Andrews was frankly skeptical of the coolness of the young man. Kennedy said nothing for some moments.

“I see you don’t want to talk,” he put in shortly.

“Nothing to talk about,” grunted Dana, in disgust.

“Then why are you here?”

“Nothing but conjecture. No facts, only suspicions,” said Dana, half to himself.

“You expect us to believe that?” insinuated Andrews.

“I can’t help what you believe. That is the fact.”

“And you were not with them?”

“No.”

“You’ll be within call, if we let you go now, any time that we want you?” interrupted Kennedy, much to the surprise of Andrews.

“I shall stay in Woodbine as long as there is any hope of clearing up this case. If you want me, I suppose I shall have to stay anyhow, even if there is a clue somewhere else.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” offered Kennedy.

“I’ll give it.”

I must say that I rather liked the young chap, although I could make nothing out of him.

As Dana Phelps disappeared down the road, Andrews turned to Kennedy. “What did you do that for?” he asked, half critically.

“Because we can watch him, anyway,” answered Craig, with a significant glance at the now empty casket. “Have him shadowed, Andrews. It may lead to something and it may not. But in any case don’t let him get out of reach.”

“Here we are in a worse mystery than ever,” grumbled Andrews. “We have caught a prisoner, but the body is gone, and we can’t even show that he was an accomplice.”

“What were you writing?” I asked Craig, endeavouring to change the subject to one more promising.

“Just copying the peculiar shape of those marks on Phelps’ arm. Perhaps we can improve on the finger-print method of identification. Those were the marks of human teeth.”

He was glancing casually at his sketch as he displayed it to us. I wondered whether he really expected to obtain proof of the identity of at least one of the ghouls by the tooth-marks.

“It shows eight teeth, one of them decayed,” he remarked. “By the way, there’s no use watching here any longer. I have some more work to do in the laboratory which will keep me another day. To-morrow night I shall be ready. Andrews, in the mean time I leave the shadowing of Dana to you, and with the help of Jameson I want you to arrange to have all those connected with the case at my laboratory to-morrow night without fail.”

Andrews and I had to do some clever scheming to bring pressure to bear on the various persons interested to insure their attendance, now that Craig was ready to act. Of course there was no difficulty in getting Dana Phelps. Andrews’s shadows reported nothing in his actions of the following day that indicated anything. Mrs. Phelps came down to town by train and Doctor Forden motored in. Andrews even took the precaution to secure Shaughnessy and the trained nurse, Miss Tracy, who had been with Montague Phelps during his illness but had not contributed anything toward untangling the case. Andrews and myself completed the little audience.

We found Kennedy heating a large mass of some composition such as dentists use in taking impressions of the teeth.

“I shall be ready in a moment,” he excused himself, still bending over his Bunsen flame. “By the way, Mr. Phelps, if you will permit me.”

He had detached a wad of the softened material. Phelps, taken by surprise, allowed him to make an impression of his teeth, almost before he realised what Kennedy was doing. The precedent set, so to speak, Kennedy approached Doctor Forden. He demurred, but finally consented. Mrs. Phelps followed, then the nurse, and even Shaughnessy.

With a quick glance at each impression, Kennedy laid them aside to harden.

“I am ready to begin,” he remarked at length, turning to a peculiar looking instrument, something like three telescopes pointing at a centre in which was a series of glass prisms.

“These five senses of ours are pretty dull detectives sometimes,” Kennedy began. “But I find that when we are able to call in outside aid we usually find that there are no more mysteries.”

He placed something in a test-tube in line before one of the barrels of the telescopes, near a brilliant electric light.

“What do you see, Walter?” he asked, indicating an eyepiece.

I looked. “A series of lines,” I replied. “What is it?”

“That,” he explained, “is a spectroscope, and those are the lines of the absorption spectrum. Each of those lines, by its presence, denotes a different substance. Now, on the pavement of the Phelps mausoleum I found, you will recall, some roundish spots. I have made a very diluted solution of them which is placed in this tube.

“The applicability of the spectroscope to the differentiation of various substances is too well known to need explanation. Its value lies in the exact nature of the evidence furnished. Even the very dilute solution which I have been able to make of the material scraped from these spots gives characteristic absorption bands between the D and E lines, as they are called. Their wave-lengths are between 5774 and 5390. It is such a distinct absorption spectrum that it is possible to determine with certainty that the fluid actually contains a certain substance, even though the microscope might fail to give sure proof. Blood—human blood—that was what those stains were.”

He paused. “The spectra of the blood pigments,” he added, “of the extremely minute quantities of blood and the decomposition products of hemoglobin in the blood are here infallibly shown, varying very distinctly with the chemical changes which the pigments may undergo.”

Whose blood was it? I asked myself. Was it of some one who had visited the tomb, who was surprised there or surprised some one else there? I was hardly ready for Kennedy’s quick remark.

“There were two kinds of blood there. One was contained in the spots on the floor all about the mausoleum. There are marks on the arm of Dana Phelps which he probably might say were made by the teeth of my police-dog, Schaef. They are human tooth-marks, however. He was bitten by some one in a struggle. It was his blood on the floor of the mausoleum. Whose were the teeth?”

Kennedy fingered the now set impressions, then resumed: “Before I answer that question, what else does the spectroscope show? I found some spots near the coffin, which has been broken open by a heavy object. It had slipped and had injured the body of Montague Phelps. From the injury some drops had oozed. My spectroscope tells me that that, too, is blood. The blood and other muscular and nervous fluids of the body had remained in an aqueous condition instead of becoming pectous. That is a remarkable circumstance.”

It flashed over me what Kennedy had been driving at in his inquiry regarding embalming. If the poisons of the embalming fluid had not been injected, he had now clear proof regarding anything his spectroscope discovered.

“I had expected to find a poison, perhaps an alkaloid,” he continued slowly, as he outlined his discoveries by the use of one of the most fascinating branches of modern science, spectroscopy. “In cases of poisoning by these substances, the spectroscope often has obvious advantages over chemical methods, for minute amounts will produce a well-defined spectrum. The spectroscope ‘spots’ the substance, to use a police idiom, the moment the case is turned over to it. There was no poison there.” He had raised his voice to emphasise the startling revelation. “Instead, I found an extraordinary amount of the substance and products of glycogen. The liver, where this substance is stored, is literally surcharged in the body of Phelps.”

He had started his moving-picture machine.

“Here I have one of the latest developments in the moving-picture art,” he resumed, “an X-ray moving picture, a feat which was until recently visionary, a science now in its infancy, bearing the formidable names of biorontgenography, or kinematoradiography.”